Bush Is Expected to Nominate Top Elected Official in St. Louis County as INS Chief

Gene McNary, St. Louis County’s top elected official, has been chosen by the Justice Department to be commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and is expected to be formally nominated by the White House, department officials said Wednesday.

McNary, whose title is county executive, will be recommended to the White House today or Friday to replace INS Commissioner Alan C. Nelson, the officials said. President Bush is expected to send the nomination soon to the Senate for confirmation.

“He’s our choice,” said one official at the Justice Department, which oversees the immigration agency.

McNary’s resume shows that he is an attorney who has been in private practice, served as an assistant public defender and been a county prosecuting attorney. He was first elected in 1975 as executive of St. Louis County government, which does not include the city of St. Louis.

The resume does not mention any immigration law experience.

No Political Baggage

Justice Department officials praised McNary, a Republican who has supported Bush since 1977, for his political savvy and asserted that he is a good choice because he would come to a potentially controversial job with no political baggage. “He’s not identified with any aspect of the issues involved,” said one official who asked to remain anonymous.

But Charles Kamasaki, director of policy analysis for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organization, said his group is “especially concerned” that McNary “has not had a lot of contact with groups primarily affected by immigration issues--Hispanics and Asians. One person’s baggage is another person’s sensitivity.”

In Clayton, Mo., Pam Grant, McNary’s spokesman, said that he has a record of proven leadership, noting that he was elected four times to head the county government, which has a $185-million budget. She said that McNary will address questions about his experience after he has been nominated.

David Runkel, special assistant to Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, said that McNary is “a leading candidate” for the federal post, calling him “an exceptionally good manager.”

Nelson, like all top-level Ronald Reagan Administration executives, submitted his resignation during the presidential transition, but he has strongly indicated that he wants to stay in the job. At a press conference Wednesday on immigration issues, he said that he has not been notified he is to be replaced.

“Obviously, I’m here as commissioner,” he told reporters, asserting that Bush and Thornburgh have “confidence in me staying on at this point” and calling himself “the longest serving senior political appointee in the Department of Justice.” Reagan appointed him to the job in 1982.

Though Nelson lobbied Bush transition officials to be reappointed, his bid was weakened by a Justice Department audit earlier this year that sharply criticized management of the agency and its handling of the massive program to permit illegal aliens to apply for legal status in this country.

At Wednesday’s news conference, Nelson and other INS officials announced what they called the success of a major INS program to curb the huge influx of Central American refugees into South Texas. They said that a special task force of border agents and other officials had significantly reduced the flow and that the $4-million-per-month effort might be scaled back by late summer.

However, the task force, in place since February, would be reassembled immediately if Central Americans fleeing their homelands began crossing again in large numbers, INS Deputy Commissioner James L. Buck said.

Some immigration experts believe that thousands of Central Americans are poised near the border, waiting for the extra personnel to pull out before resuming mass illegal crossings. It is not clear how long INS can maintain the task force before it would strain its $1-billion annual budget.

“We’re in effect spending more than we want to early in the year,” said INS spokesman Verne Jervis. “It means we’ll have to tighten up as we get near the end of the year.”

The 400-person task force--including a beefed-up border patrol, asylum examiners and detention officers to hold those who fail to qualify for refugee status--has been aided by officials in Mexico, the INS officials said. They said that Mexican officials set up highway checkpoints and made sweeps in big cities, netting 13,000 Central Americans already this year as they headed north through Mexico toward the U.S. border. This was a vast increase over the 12,000 caught in Mexico all last year.

Buck, who oversees the South Texas task force, which was formed by shifting employees from other parts of the country, said that the number of immigrants applying for asylum had reached 300 a day when the force was deployed Feb. 21. The average now is only about five a day, he said.

“By the end of summer, if things continue to hold as they are now, we could start to phase down the task force,” Buck said, noting that some examiners of refugee applications already have been sent to Miami.

Nelson said that border-crossing trends will determine how soon and how many INS employees will be moved out of Texas. “We’re fluid depending on the flow,” he said.

Fleeing Poverty, War

The task force, formed amid a crush of Central Americans fleeing poverty and war in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, was designed to quickly weed out “frivolous” asylum claims, Nelson said on Feb. 20. He announced then that applicants who failed to qualify for refugee status would no longer be allowed to travel away from Texas, a preferred entry point, but would be detained there instead.

An upbeat Nelson asserted Wednesday that the “problem has been resolved,” but Rick Swartz, president of the National Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Forum, a coalition of 110 groups that study immigration issues, said: “I’m hearing that a lot of people are poised” to cross the border seeking refugee status. “If INS dismantles (the task force), they’re going to be right back where they were in three, four months.”